Healing Work Today

In December 2023 the Irish mental health network Mad in Ireland broadcast a conversation with two of the country’s longest-standing teachers of Celtic shamanism, John Cantwell and Karen Ward of Slí An Chroí, about what shamanic practice might offer people looking for a healing path outside the psychiatric model. The presenters began from an observation many Irish people will recognise. Shamanism sounds like something from “over there,” Siberia or the Amazon, not something Irish. Yet Ireland had its own healers, its own words for them and its own ways of working, and most of those were “disappeared,” first by colonial rulers, then by the church, then by the confident rationalism of the modern age. What survived, survived in folklore. In the last few decades it has begun to come back, and it has come back largely through healing.

The Old Healers and the New

The healing callings of the Gaelic world are described on The Old Callings: the bean feasa who went to the fairies to bargain for someone who had been taken, the fairy doctor who drew out the elf-shot, the woman of healing with her herbs and charms, the family that held the cure for burns or shingles. Their work maps closely onto the classic shamanic healing methods.

The resemblance is real, but the frame has changed. The fairy doctor worked inside a community that shared the same picture of the world, where everyone knew what it meant to be “taken.” The modern practitioner usually works with a client who arrives with a psychological vocabulary and a medical history. Good practitioners hold both languages and do not force one onto the other.

What a Session Involves

Practitioners vary, but a responsible healing session in the core shamanic manner usually follows this shape.

1. Conversation. What brings you, what you hope for, your health, any treatment you are receiving. A practitioner who does not ask is not one to stay with.
2. Consent. A plain account of what will be done and what you might experience. You may stop at any point.
3. The journey. The practitioner, usually lying beside you to the drum, journeys with their helping spirits on your behalf, to retrieve what was lost or to find what does not belong.
4. The return. What was retrieved is returned, often by blowing it into the heart and the crown. What was extracted is released to the earth or water.
5. The telling. The practitioner tells you what was seen, simply and without drama, and you are invited to make your own sense of it.
6. The aftercare. Suggestions for the weeks ahead: rest, time on the land, a practice, sometimes a task. Healing of this kind is usually understood to unfold slowly.

Shamanic counselling is a different and in some ways gentler method, developed by Michael Harner and taught in Ireland by, among others, the Irish Centre for Shamanic Studies at Dunderry Park in Co. Meath. Here the client journeys to the drum and narrates the journey aloud as it happens. The counsellor helps frame the intention beforehand and helps the client understand the experience afterwards. The client meets their own helpers and receives their own guidance, and the counsellor never stands between them and the spirits. It is close in spirit to the old practice of sending a seeker to sleep at the holy place for their own dream.

The Wounded Healer

Across the world, shamans are typically called through a crisis of their own: an illness, a breakdown, a brush with death, from which they recover changed. Irish teachers speak of the shamanic path as the way of the wounded healer, and Martin Duffy of the Irish Centre for Shamanic Studies puts it bluntly: to be human is to be wounded. Many of the modern practitioners you will meet came to the work through their own suffering, and the best of them carry it as a source of compassion rather than a credential.

The Celtic sources know this pattern. Fionn wins his wisdom by burning his thumb; Suibhne finds his poetry by losing his mind; the fairy doctors were often, in Yeats’s account, people the fairies had carried off for seven years. But the tradition does not glamorise the wound, and neither should we. Being hurt does not make a healer. Recovering, being trained and being accountable does.

Mind, Spirit and the Clinic

Shamanic healing is not a replacement for medical or psychological care, and practitioners who suggest otherwise are not to be trusted. That said, many people find that it reaches parts of their experience that the clinic does not, and some, as the Mad in Ireland conversation explored, are actively looking for a way of understanding their suffering that does not reduce it to a diagnosis.

Our view is that the two can sit side by side, as the cure and the doctor have sat side by side in rural Ireland for generations. In practice this means:

• Tell both. If you are in treatment, tell your clinician you are seeing a shamanic practitioner, and tell the practitioner about your treatment.
• Never stop medication on the advice of a spiritual practitioner. A practitioner who suggests it should be left at once.
• Wait if you are in crisis. Journeying and healing sessions are not recommended in acute psychiatric crisis, active psychosis or severe dissociation. Seek clinical help first.
• Know about spiritual emergency. Stanislav and Christina Grof coined the phrase for intense spiritual experiences that overwhelm ordinary functioning. They can be part of a healing process, but they need skilled support, often from both a therapist and a spiritual guide.
• Go slowly. One session is usually enough to know whether the work suits you. Healing is unlikely to come from a weekly dependence on someone else’s journeys.

Choosing a Practitioner

There is no licensing body for shamanic practitioners, in Ireland or anywhere else, and certificates are issued by schools rather than by any tradition. That puts the responsibility on you. These are the questions we would ask.

Where the Work Is Taught

Most practitioners in the Celtic lands learned the core methods first, through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies or teachers trained by Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman, and then deepened them in the Celtic tradition. In Ireland two long-established centres show the range. Slí An Chroí, led by John Cantwell and Karen Ward, teaches what it calls Irish Celtic shamanism, rooted in the land, mythology and sacred sites of Ireland, and says openly that it also draws on core shamanism and on an Andean lineage received from Q’ero teachers in Peru. The Irish Centre for Shamanic Studies at Dunderry Park, in the Boyne Valley close to Tara, Newgrange and Loughcrew, was set up by Martin Duffy, a psychotherapist, and combines shamanic training with transpersonal psychology. Their websites are in our Library. We list them because they appear in our sources, not as an endorsement; the questions above apply to every teacher, including any we name.

We do not keep a directory and we do not train healers. Our circle is a place to learn to journey for yourself, which is where every healer begins. If you want to start there, read The Practices and join the circle.